


Something Is Wrong With Richie

by geicogecko



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate title: I project my problems as an adhd female on Richie Tozier, Gender Swapped Losers Club, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris Are Best Friends, Richie Tozier Has ADHD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:21:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24692932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geicogecko/pseuds/geicogecko
Summary: When boys keep being told to be quiet they just get louder.When girls keep being told to be quiet, eventually, the learn how to shut up. Especially incredibly insecure girls named Richie Tozier.The Losers would not care for that at all, they'd shut it down as fast as they possibly could, they just need to realize that there is a problem first.
Relationships: The Losers Club & Richie Tozier
Comments: 9
Kudos: 46





	Something Is Wrong With Richie

If you asked anyone who they thought noticed something was wrong with Richie first, they would most definitely say Stan. It made sense, she was Richie’s best friend and the one who the rest of the Losers trusted to handle her ADHD when it got overwhelming because she unequivocally knew the most about it. Stan herself would tell you she would and should be the first to clock any anomaly in her best friend’s behavior, and once all is said and done, that she’s more than a little ashamed she hadn’t been when she actually needed to be (any of the other Losers would tell her exactly how much bullshit that train of thought was, she was human and human made errors, but Stan held herself to a higher standard than she should, especially when it came to her friends).

However, what most people don’t take into account how much harder it is to recognize a change the more you know someone. When you know someone and their mannerisms so thoroughly, inside and out, they get hammered into your skull and your perspective skews. You don’t want to think about anything bad going on with someone you love, so your brain decides to ignore it, it has enough backup logs for how they normally act to fall back on and it blinds you from the problems right in front of your eyes.

So Stan doesn’t notice, at least not right away.

It is Ben who realizes there’s something wrong with Richie first. Sweet, sensitive Ben who was almost debilitatingly empathetic to her friends and still just enough of a New Kid that she was able to recognize a shift in her friend’s behavior.

They’re in history class when it happens, Ben doesn’t notice right away, too buried in her notes (only partially because she finds the revolutionary war incredibly interesting, if not equally, incredibly depressing; she also needs to make sure her notes for this class are perfect enough to share because Richie gets ‘way too fucking bored to take any Benny, my head will explode if I need to focus enough to write it all down’ and Eddie’s notes always end up more like angry rants about the inequality and unfairness of the past to be any help at all). 

She drones out the chatter of people behind her and Eddie’s too loud whispering in her ear every couple of minutes, words blending with the squeak of her highlighter across cheap notebook paper and Richie’s chewed up pencil tap-tap-tapping on the edge of her desk. It’s a comfortably familiar cacophony of sounds.

“Miss Tozier one more disruption like that and you’ll be earning yourself a one way ticket to the principal's office!” That, unfortunately, was also an incredibly familiar sound.

It’s strange though, the silence around the rest of the class’ snickers. 

“She didn’t even say anything!” Eddie cries, slamming her pen against her open notebook, the teacher squawks something in retaliation but Ben isn’t paying attention anymore. 

Eddies right, Richie hasn’t said anything all class, even when the teacher had drawn a diagram on the board which looked far more like a dick than a revolutionary era cannon, she’d just snorted and scribbled a doodle in the margins of her textbook. Even now she’s quiet, staring down at her hands and shrinking into the sweatshirt Ben had lent her this morning. This is normally where she retaliates, some quip about their teacher’s disappointing sex life, and gets kicked out of class. But Richie is silent. Actually, if Ben really thought about it, she hadn’t gotten detention for her trashmouth in a while. In fact she’d barely talked at  _ all  _ in class in the past few days, not even when questions were asked that Ben  _ knew  _ she knew the answers to. 

She watched her the rest of the period, quiet and swimming in the extra material of Ben’s hoodie, after a few months of lending her sweaters to her forgetful, often unprepared friend she’d stopped feeling so gut wrenchingly, cripplingly insecure about how the shirts hung of Richie’s scrawny frame; but looking at her now, a different, but just as dreadful feeling coiled in her stomach. She’d never noticed how Richie had looked like she was hiding behind the excess fabric. That and the sudden silence was painting a picture Ben didn’t quite like. It was almost as if she was trying to make it so no one noticed her, but that was crazy, right?

It’s  _ Richie _ ! Loud, brightly colored, unbreakable Richie who fed off attention like it was something she needed to survive. 

She pulls Eddie aside after class and asks if she noticed anything weird going on with their friend, but she just shrugs and says something like ‘nah, just as annoying as ever’ in the same trying-not-to-sound-fond voice she always has when talking about Richie that every single Loser except maybe the Trashmouth herself could see through in a second. Ben feels stupid and half embaressed as Eddie walks away, she’s probably wrong anyway, Richie’s just having an off day and Ben is reading way too much into it.

Richie is fine.

But she keeps looking, noticing, pinning up oddities on a mental corkboard and connecting them with red string. 

She jokes still, but they aren’t the same. They’re held back and awkward and she doesn’t laugh at them quite as hard as before. She only tells them to the Losers.

She doesn’t raise her hand in class, even on a review day before a test when the teacher is giving out candy to students who get answers right, something that Richie would normally lose her mind over. Several months ago, in her fervor to bring the teacher’s attention and bucket of candy over to her, she’d tipped her desk. Now she just rests her head on her arms and watches with a barely crooked smile.

She’s less opinionated, less noisy, less bright, she just  _ less _ and it’s driving Ben fucking  _ insane _ .

But it’s all inconclusive evidence. There is still an unnervingly large number of uncharted variables, there is still a too big chance that this is all just a misunderstanding. 

She can’t stop picturing worst case scenarios where she brings it up to Richie and she laughs in her face or gets angry at her for sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong.

Everytime she pictures mentioning it to any of the other Losers, to Bev or Bill or Stan or Eddie the same possible humiliation or confrontation plays behind her eyelids like a movie she doesn’t want to be watching.

There is only one person she thinks might understand and be willing to listen long enough for her to adequately explain her findings.

That is how Mike Hanlon realizes that there is something wrong with Richie.

To be fair to Mike, she most likely would have noticed on her own, but she has the unfortunate disadvantage of not going to school with them, so she doesn’t get to experience first hand where the most egregiously Not-Richie problems take place. Richie is better once they get to the clubhouse, still muted, but she doesn’t seem to hide as much.

Ben and Mike have a sort of understanding between the two, it’s why Ben, blushing and bubbling over with ‘I’m not sure’s and ‘It’s probably nothing’s, feels comfortable asking her for help and why Mike immediately accepts her judgement of the situation.   
They’re the two who the others most often turn to for advice, reassurance, or to vent and over the years they’ve combined their efforts so they can help their friends as best as possible without going fucking insane from having to deal with the most dramatic people alive. They love them but they’re all a lot for one person to handle, which is why they have two.

Ben fills in for Mike at school and is far more comfortable with things like tears and broken hearts and gross, complicated feelings while Mike has the confidence Ben lacks that lets her bring up problems they’ve noticed and actually take action to fix them.

It’s Mike who starts asking Richie her opinion on things, the music they listen to or what movie they’re going to see later in the week, the kind of question Richie was  _ supposed  _ to jump at the chance to offer her insight on. She just deflects the questions easily to other people in a simple but infuriating pattern of ‘I don’t care’ and ‘anything is cool with me’.

Mike looks just as lost as Ben feels, keeps trying fruitlessly to bring it back to her: “No, Rich,  _ really _ , what kind of pizza should we order for Bill’s this weekend?”

It doesn’t work.

Eddie beeps her after a weak joke about motorboating her mom and Richie doesn’t talk for the rest of the night.

Mike offers Ben a ride home as they all gather their things to leave, going for a nonchalant and missing it by a mile. If Richie was acting normal she’d probably pick up on it and ask far too loudly if she was nervous because they were about to ‘do it in the back of Mikey’s truck’ or something equally as tasteless. Instead she just raises an eyebrow and shoves a comic into her backpack. Mike looks like she’s about to scream.

The second they get into her car she slams her fist against the dashboard, resting her head on the steering wheel and groaning into puffed out cheeks before turning to look at Ben.

“ _ Damnit _ , what’s going  _ on _ ?”

“I know! She’s acting weird right, I’m not losing it?”

“No, you aren’t, something is definitely up.”

Stan Uris watches them drive off from behind a tree, she couldn’t hear them but she could see their frustration, backlit by the watery moonlight and the artificial white that filtered from Mike’s dash. Despite her unintentional blind eye to the issue, Stan wasn’t an idiot, she was observant and it wasn’t hard to catch the looks between the two and their targeted aims towards Richie.

Stan hadn’t noticed anything wrong with her best friend, she’d seemed fine and hadn’t come to Stan with any problems (not that she ever did straight up come to her with her problems, she more like came to Stan with inexplicably obnoxious energy she was able to chip away at until eventually the other girl was vulnerable enough to comfort) which normally meant things were going well. She thinks, peeking behind the tree and hands suddenly shaking, that this might not be normal circumstances.   
And that is how Stan realizes there might be something wrong with Richie.

They don’t have a lot of classes together, both of them are incredibly smart but in different ways (Stan fights and claws and struggles her way to the top of the class, Richie doesn’t need to try, but Stan doesn’t envy her, she knows that classes make Richie want to tear her hair out of her skull in a way they don’t make Stan). Their schedules reflect the differences, Stan is better at math and Richie is better at english, so her AP Statistics class at the same time as Richie’s AP Lit class, both hate history with a passion, Stan misguidedly shifted her social studies credit to a law class she thought would be better, it wasn’t, she’s the only girl and she spends the whole period contemplating murder, Richie takes Honors US History with Ben and Eddie. (It’s good that she does, or else it might have taken longer for Ben to notice, not that Stan knows about any of that yet). Stan’s extracurriculars are filled with bonus science classes and doubled up maths while Richie’s are things like drama and meteorology which she thought at the beginning of the year was going to be a cool class about space and was terribly disappointed when she realized it was  _ weather _ . The only extracurricular that they share is choir, and it's hard to keep track of Richie from across the room, Sopranos and Altos couldn’t be seated further apart but even from the distance and over the din of the shitty Derry High Concert Choir failing to harmonize she can tell something is  _ wrong _ . She doesn’t know how she hadn’t realized it before, Richie’s head is buried in her black music folder all class, and in between songs when the whispering in the room reaches deafening levels of dozens of kids not actually trying to be quiet Richie doesn’t come over and sit next to Stan like normal or shout at her from across the room. She doesn’t say anything at all. 

She just looks spaced out and embarrassed the whole period and Stan doesn’t fucking understand. 

Both of them are excellent at science, they share last period Chemistry.

Chemistry is a closer, significantly more heartbreaking look at the problem and all it does is make her want to wrap Richie up in a hug or slam her thick stupid head into a wall until she comes and talks to her about what’s wrong. Because something is fucking  _ wrong _ and no one seems to notice. The teachers still snip at her, telling her silent mouth to shut up and informing her they’re keeping an eye on her, their classmates laugh about it.

Stan writes her notes on atomic structure so hard she breaks her pencil tip. 

Why are they learning about something so useless right now? How the hell hadn’t the world been put on pause when there was something wrong with Richie Tozier? Nothing should be normal until Stan figures out how to fix it, she fucking hates having a problem she can’t solve and watching Richie flushed and soundless makes her feel achingly useless.

She tries to talk to her after the bell rings, shoulders pressed together in the crowded hallway as everyone rushes to the door.

“Are you alright?”

“Me? Yeah? I’m fine.”

“You sure? You just seem sort of… quiet.”

“Sure I’m sure! I’m A-Ok! Peachy keen jelly bean! Doing just swell!” It's forced, so incredibly forced and tense, said with such a fake smile that all it does is make Stan even more convinced something is wrong.

“Rich-”

“I gotta go Staniel! Stay sexy! That was weird, beep beep, sorry!” She shoots awkward finger guns at her and shrinks even tinier, shoulder folded in and head bowed so her face is hidden behind a curtain of her hair. Stan wants to fucking puke.

She brings it up to Eddie outside at the bike rack, asks if she’s noticed just how weird Richie’s been acting.

“Richie’s always  _ weird _ , she’s  _ Richie _ !” She laughed somewhat defensively and then groans about having to go straight home because she has a doctor's appointment, topic of conversation effectively forgotten despite Stan’s efforts to bring it back up.

She, eventually, swallows back her pride and goes to talk to Ben and Mike, who somehow managed to figure this shit out before her. She doesn’t want to act jealous about it, because it isn’t their fault Stan has apparently been ignoring signs left and right, but she is. How did they figure it out first, how is that  _ fair _ ?

Her guilt fueled jealousy tamps down as they discuss the problem, sitting on the floor of Mike’s barn, staring into their full cups of lemonade her grandpa had been nice enough to bring out for them but none feel quite up to drinking as they combine their findings. Everything comes just slightly more into focus but it’s hard to feel happy about it. Ben cries as she explains all the things they’ve seen happening and Stan presses the heels of her hands hard against her eyes so she doesn’t join her, she just feels so useless, they still don’t know what happened, just that something did and now Richie is acting all quiet and strange and distinctly Not-Richie like.

They don’t know how they are supposed to help.

Bev comes up behind Ben and Stan one day in their joint free period, reeking of stale cigarette smoke and the shitty cologne none of them can stand but he claims makes him smell  _ parisian _ . __

“Have you guys noticed that Richie’s acting fucking weird?” He plops his backpack in the seat next to Ben and sprawls across both chairs in front of them, despite the practiced casual air that guides his motions he looks incredibly concerned.

Apparently, Bev had figured out himself that there was something wrong with Richie when he asked her to skip third period to smoke with him under the bleachers and it had taken some wheedling, which was an oddity in itself. Apparently the whole time she’d let him talk  _ at _ her, didn’t even tease him when he told her a story about stitching a shirt to his own sleeve or attempt to entertain him when he complained that he was bored.

“It was like she had forgotten how to form words, she kept opening her mouth like she was going to say something and swallowing it back. She made like four jokes  _ maximum _ , it was weird.” Ben fills him in on what they’ve noticed while Stan slams her forehead against the book about birds of the northwest she’d been ignoring on the table.

Bev is incredibly helpful to their little team, he’s not as observant as the rest of them, self proclaimed ‘one of the dumbest Losers’ (which is unequivocally false, he’s whipstick clever, wonderfully creative, and has a level of emotional intelligence most of the other Losers can only dream about), but he is similar enough to Richie that he has a slightly more personal perspective on the problem and a better idea of how to drag things out of her.

He cojoles her outside for smoke breaks more and more frequently to garner how she’s doing, so much so that Richie has started asking him if  _ he  _ is okay which isn’t the intended reaction but at least she’s saying anything at all. That's  _ something  _ and right now they’re all just grasping at what they can get.

Bev can get Richie to talk even a little, which is an incredibly important gift because somehow, when they weren’t looking, the problem had slowly gotten worse.

She’s quieter around all of them, just buries herself in the hammock and hides behind comic books and homework they know she’s not actually doing.

When Eddie jokingly snaps at her that her ten minutes are up she actually climbs out of the hammock and sits on the floor. That even makes Eddie, who has been staunch in her claim that Richie is  _ fine _ no matter how often the Losers try to get her insight on the issue, look unsettled.

Bill, to everyone's surprise, realizes there is something wrong with Richie all on her own. 

They really hadn’t been expecting her to, actually they had several contingency plans prepared to let her know there was a problem because she was unequivocally their leader and none of them felt comfortable confronting Richie about the problem without her there. Even if she is the most unobservant dumbass they know, she’s  _ their  _ unobservant dumbass and they need her.

She actually brings it up the first time  _ to _ Richie at the lunch table, which isn’t ideal because Richie’s cheeks burn red before she stammers out a weak excuse and spends the rest of the period in the bathroom after poor Bill asks why she’s been so quiet recently. The other Losers are far too surprised she noticed to intervene until it's just a second too late.

“God, you’re all ridiculous, she’s fucking  _ fine _ !” Eddie huffs before dumping the rest of her lunch in the garbage and following Richie out. 

“D-did I say something wrong?” Bill asks, looking fifty percent guilty, fifty percent hopelessly lost and they fill her in.

She blames herself, which to be fair they all do to some extent, but her whole face crumples in the familiar guilt ridden devastated expression that Bill adopts far too often and they need to stop her from going after Richie to apologize because that would most likely do more harm than good.

“I should have r-r-realized something was wr-r-rong! What if so-o-omeone d-did something and I could have st-topped it!”

“Bill, none of us realized for a while, it isn’t your fault.” Bev goes for comforting but it falls flat with the bitter self depreciation that lines his statement. 

They finish their lunch in silence and everyone pretends not to notice the tears getting soaked into the cuff of the flannel Bill keeps periodically pressing against her eyes. 

They all sort of knew, once Bill found out, that it was the beginning of the end. She wasn’t great at subtlety and how bad she felt about not being able to help manifested itself into aimless apologies and random hugs that just seemed to unnerve Richie more than they helped.

None of them want to go into what they are sure is going to be a difficult confrontation short staffed, but Eddie is being incredibly difficult about the whole thing. 

She refuses to acknowledge that Richie is acting weird, telling them in the cuttingly manic way really only Eddie can achieve how stupid she thinks they’re all being. 

Bill offers to walk her home after one such argument, voice tight and laced with something angry, and they talk about it. Eddie still refuses to recognize the problem for what it is or talk about it but apparently the walk helps, at least a little. No one really knows what Bill says to her to convince her to come to the clubhouse the day they’ve all planned to talk to Richie but when the time comes she’s there, pouting in the hammock and rolling her eyes as they all putter nervously around the small space waiting for their Trashmouth to show up. 

“Am I… late?” Richie asks, sounding genuinely confused when she finally climbs down the ladder and sees them all already there, looking at her wide eyed and just slightly panicked. 

“Almost always, but sit down, we wanna talk to you.” Stan quips easily, offering her a forced smile that just makes Richie want to dip out of the situation immediately. 

“About what?” She plops herself awkwardly onto the floor, legs drawn against her chest and fingers drumming a nervous, rhythmic beat on her kneecap.

“Richie… what is going on?” Ben asks, voice softly cautious and Richie squints at her.

“Nothing? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Why you’ve b-b-been so w-w-weird!” Bill snaps, which isn’t really the plan but looking back any of the Losers will tell you that it had been a weak excuse for a “plan” and was bound to go off the rails eventually, this was just sooner rather than later.

“I haven’t been weird!” Richie retaliates, voice high with nerves and leg bouncing hard against the floor in anxious  _ thunk thunk _ s.

That is, believe it or not, the most functional part of the confrontation, which devolves so rapidly after that point that in minutes everyone is shouting. 

Richie is shouting back, which they all get some sort of sick relief from because it’s not  _ good _ , not at  _ all  _ but at least she’s making  _ noise _ , she’s showing her  _ emotions _ and that's more than they’ve seen in weeks. 

Well, they have sick relief until she bursts into tears and sprints out of the clubhouse.

Watching Richie cry really drains any fight out of them.

“Wow. We fucked that up didn’t we?” Bev comments, voice wavering dangerously thick.

“Yeah, you fucking did, _ jesus christ _ .” Eddie snaps and storms out in a flurry of  _ I told you so _ s none of them can even get offended by.

The Losers had indeed fucked that up, it was an unequivocal fact. Where they went wrong wasn’t exactly their fault, but human error is still error. They were worried, no one could fault them for that, but in their worry they didn’t remember that their Richie, bright, loud, unbreakable Richie, had somehow broken and they were going to need to solve the problem differently than they normally would. (Not that a group intervention really would have ever worked, they were stupid for thinking it would.)

They forgot they needed to be gentle and that made all the difference.

“How the  _ fuck _ did this happen?” Stan chokes out, heels of her hands crushing her eyes so no one can see how she’s crying. They’re all crying, it’s really not something she needs to hide.

_ (How it happened is this: Richie is having a bad day. The kind of bad day where time feels like it's moving too slow and the words on pages don’t register in her head as sentences and everything is too much and not enough all at once.  _

_ She talks over the painfully distracting noise around her, hoping the people around her get the memo that they should stop talking stop tapping stop whispering stop stop stop but they don’t. Her friends keep shooting her warning looks when she has classes with them, well, she thinks Bev is more entertained than annoyed, he high fives her when she gets her third ‘Miss Tozier! If I need to tell you one more time to be quiet you’ll be spending the rest of the period in the principal's office’ of the day, he calls it a new record, which it is.  _

_ She hates it. _

_ She seems incredibly in tune with the voices around her, the ones calling her an idiot and obnoxious and a spazz. They make her stomach twist up in uncomfortable little knots that won’t go away no matter how much she tries to convince herself that she doesn’t care what others think about her.  _

_ She does care, though, she cares so much it’s painful. _

_ She has drama fifth period, it’s normally her favorite class and the only one she can stand when her head gets like this, but today it is actively making her want to drop out of high school all together. _

_ They’re performing a group improv and one of the girl’s in Richie’s group, a freshman named Sandra who is playing her daughter, is wearing a wool sweater. _

_ It’s a completely unremarkable sweater, sort of an ugly shade of blue and a little too big on her but otherwise just a sweater. _

_ It makes Richie want to peel her skin off.  _

_ Sandra is sitting in her lap during the scene, the material of her stupid fucking wool sweater rubbing against her bare arms and hands and face, itchy and bad and gross. She kept rubbing her palm over the thigh of her jeans until it burned a little from the friction because her brain kept firing messages that it was a _ **_bad bad bad texture and she needed to get it off_ ** _.  _

_ Richie usually carries group improvs, she’s shameless enough that she can do the embarrassing lift work to get the scene off the ground and the rest of her classmates just piggyback off that. _

_ But today she keeps noticing little eyerolls when she dramatically makes a claim to shift the ploy or the annoyed huffs through her groupmate’s noses when she loudly responds with a joke she thinks is terribly funny.  _

_ She is incredibly in tune with the half real, half fabricated in her head annoyance of the people around her. _

_ “I can’t believe you boys would do this! On this! The most important day of my life! You ruined your little sister’s second grade science fair!”  _

_ “Shut the fuck up Richie, no one thinks your funny, your just annoying.” Someone informs her and for the first time ever, Richie listens.  _

_ No one else heard someone say that, because it all happened in Richie’s head. _

_ She shuts up and no one acts disappointed, the scene goes on before the inevitable crash and burn of any high school improv, and no one notices how quiet she’s being because they aren’t her friends so they don’t care enough about her to think all too hard about how she works. _

_ Well, the teacher notices and docks ten points off her performance, but she isn’t concerned about her, just annoyed she stopped contributing. _

_ Richie doesn’t register the incident, there's no big grand moment when she decides the world would be better off if she stopped talking, but without realizing it she internalizes the idea. _

_ She talks less, she gets less glares from teachers and classmates, her mother comments idly at the dinner table that she’s been rather subdued recently but she doesn’t seem too torn up about it. _

_ It really all starts with a few swallowed back jokes and quieter whispers in class but at some point something flipped, Richie can’t say anything without over analyzing how annoying it sounds, how embarrassing it is,  _ **_no one cares Trashmouth so shut the fuck up_ ** _. _

_ She doesn’t know how to get back to how she was before and it almost scares her. But she’s better this way, people like her better this way, no one can hate her for her big mouth if she never opens it.  _

_ It works. She’s fine, really, she’s fucking fine. _

_Well until all her friends are yelling at her in the clubhouse and her brain is yelling at her that_ ** _she_** **_fucked up and they hate her now she’ll be alone because they all hate her and she’s too difficult to be friends with_** _._

_ She hides out in the park, she doesn’t feel like going home right now, her mom will absolutely notice her bloodshot eyes and wet sniffles and she really doesn’t want to worry her. _

_ So she sits on a park bench and tilts her head up to look at the stars through the trees, warm tears falling sideways out of the corners of her eyes and soaking into her hair.  _

_ She hadn’t cried in a while, it felt kind of nice. _

_ Her brain won’t shut up, it hadn’t this whole time, it was always loud loud  _ **_loud_ ** _ , but she doesn’t say a word.) _

What the Losers do not realize is that Eddie Kaspbrak was actually the first to realize there was something wrong with Richie Tozier, from the first few days of her new and not-improved subdued quiet she kept getting alerts in the back of her mind that something was  _ wrong wrong wrong _ . 

She just refused to recognize it. 

It wasn’t malicious or anything, anyone who thought she was ignoring Richie’s slow devolvement to be mean just had a fundamental misunderstanding of how they worked. If Richie was broken Eddie didn’t have anyone to fall back on. Well, she had the other Losers, of course, arguably she was even closer to Bill than she was with Richie. But Bill was their  _ leader _ , not their support system. That was Ben, Mike, Bev, and Richie: Ben and Bev brought the warmth, Mike brought the strength, and Richie brought the  _ light _ . If Richie was broken that meant someone had turned the light off and Eddie knows, inevitably, she would get lost in the dark. 

Ignoring it is the closest thing she can get to peace of mind, it’s  _ Richie _ , she’ll get over it soon and everything will go back to normal. Richie will crawl through her window with a big smile and too loud whispers and everything will be fine again. 

It’s Richie and Richie is always alright.

Her stubborn ignorance on the issue was frustrating, sure, but there was a reason behind it and all the Losers knew that. That didn’t mean they had to  _ like it  _ but they understood.

But standing in the middle of a park, watching one of your best friends fucking  _ cry _ alone, after weeks of  _ knowing  _ there was something wrong sort of forces you to acknowledge the issue.

“Hey dipshit, you freaked everyone out when you ran out.” Richie starts, lurching half off the bench which would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. 

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault, they were being dicks.” She snorts, hip checking Richie over enough so she can sit next to her, “Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not… I… look I didn’t mean to upset anyone.”

“I know.” 

Richie cries into her shoulder, and Eddie lets her, ignoring her discomfort at the quiet and the gross germs soaking from Richie’s face into her sleeve. 

She doesn’t know how to tell Richie that her favorite sound in the world is her laugh, how it’s bright and brassy and more healing than fresh air and sunlight, how to tell her that she loves hearing her ramble even if she acts like she doesn’t, how to convey how worried the other Losers have been over what is wrong and just how much they care about her.

Eddie’s not great at gentle, she’s not the best at words, but she’s willing to try.

Eventually she coaxes her back to the clubhouse where there are five shame faced apologies waiting and Richie gets lost in a flood of hugs and repeated apologies and reassurances that she doesn’t need to be embarrassed when she starts to cry again.

Bill, ruddy cheeked with the same guilty face she’d been making too often recently, protectively wraps Richie up in her arm and whispers in her ear that if someone said something to her that made her start acting like this she’d be more than willing to beat them up. 

It’s what they’re all wondering, if it was any other situation someone would probably make a joke over it, who got the Trashmouth to actually shut up and how on  _ Earth  _ did they manage it? 

But there isn’t anything funny about this situation and no one feels like joking, they feel like punching someone’s teeth in.

Richie really doesn’t know how to explain that no one said anything to her, that Bill had just offered to beat Richie up because she was the only guilty party for her recent actions. How does she tell her best friends that she is so fucking  _ stupid _ and insecure and phiscally incapable of saying anything without being obnoxious, that she’s terrified her friends will eventually realize and leave her to be annoying all alone.

She just shakes her head and no one presses her. Both parties swallow back the words they desperately want to say. None of the Losers go home that night, it’s a problem for tomorrow, instead they fall asleep on the clubhouse floor, Richie wrapped in the middle of their cuddle pile, and for just a moment, for the first time in a while, things feel normal.

The problem doesn’t just go away overnight, no one could really expect it to, it’s too deep rooted and unfortunately for them they don’t just live in a little bubble that only consists of the Losers Club. The town of Derry just loves to  _ take _ and it feels as if the whole world outside the clubhouse is structured to try and keep Richie quiet.

But it gets better, slowly but surely. School is still hard, kids (and adults, to be fair) can be cruel and incredibly skilled at making almost anyone feel like they should never speak again but the Losers are also incredibly skilled at making sure she knows they want to listen to what she has to say. Beeping is less frequent, they ask her opinion, they give her the attention she needs without being asked.

None of them had ever thought they’d be happy to hear a joke about how long Richie’s non-existent dick was, but after months of radio silence it’s more than welcome. 

If anything, the whole experience is just a good reminder that their Trashmouth, their comedian, their fellow Loser is above all else their  _ Richie _ , that she is human and has feelings that can be easily hurt. It’s not entirely their fault that they forget sometimes, Richie is upsettingly skilled at hiding it but that isn’t an excuse, they should be able to see through her poorly constructed walls.

She’s a member of the Losers Club, she’s one of them, and she  _ isn’t _ annoying when she speaks.

Well, sometimes she is, more often than not really, but it’s what makes her  _ Richie _ and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

And eventually, after years of them telling her so, she believes it.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, a Female Richie Tozier who has ADHD and insecurities and is completely and entirely adored by her friends is something that can be so personal.  
> Anyway I wrote this to cope with the fact that I graduated high school today and it isn't the best but I think it's fun.


End file.
